"Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters." Isaac Asimov

Greetings, fellow travelers, here at the twilight's last gleaming. What we so proudly hail’d as the American Frontier is now a web of tangled development, interspersed with fought-over public property, strangled rivers, clogged boulevards, drive-by shooting galleries, ozonated skies, and 57 stations with nothing on. Make that 5,700 stations, assuming you’re wired to the gills with hi-fi wi-fi, satellite radio, laptop cyber-interface, and blue tooth chip implants. It’s boogie-till-ya-drop on the shore dimly seen thro' the mists of the deep where the havoc of war and the battle's confusion is never more than a quick jump-cut away from CNN or Dan Rather’s new "news and guts" endeavor.

There’s no use beating around the proverbial bush, even the same species of shrub that turned Moses into a babbling baboon with a penchant for petroglyphs. So, here’s the spin, plain and simple: In full glory reflected, America has reached the nefarious milestone of achieving a population of 300,000,000 Homo erectus aspahltus, give or take a few million. So, let’s examine what it means to be a citizen in these wondrous times. It’s a subject rife with sordid facts, not the least of which is that no one amongst us has any idea how to ensure that 300,000,000 high-tech monkeys won’t turn what remains of America’s relatively undeveloped landscape into a big fat hog waller.

It’s said that the early pioneers in Kentucky up and moved whenever they heard the sound of a newcomer’s axe reverberating through the deep woods. Elbow room was there for the taking, assuming you didn’t mind backbreaking labor in the quest to transform one of the planet’s most spectacular forest ecosystems into a checkerboard of scrub farms, barnyards, and moonshine stills. That a highly evolved, complex culture of so-called Indians already lived in said woods was little more than a bump in the road for our forebears in coonskin caps.

But during the frothy era of American expansion, nobody in their right mind could’ve dreamed of anything even approximating the America of today. The idea that interlocking freeways would one day connect massive industrial metropolitan termite mounds simply wasn’t part of the frontier mental terrain. And what if it had been? Would the pioneers have charted a vastly different course in search of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian dream? Or would the Hamiltonian mojo have prevailed, leaving us right where we find ourselves today: in a shrinking sardine can of human sprawl?

Thomas Jefferson was an interesting character: philosopher, amateur scientist, writer extraordinaire (re-wrote the New Testament for fun), uber-revolutionary, and President of the United States. Jefferson understood that human beings tend to flower under conditions of personal freedom, benign government, and lots of space. His yeoman farmer ideal may seem quaint in today’s terms, but that’s because we’ve been conned into accepting cultural implosion as normal. Rather than the Israelites, T.J. recognized America’s farmers as the chosen people of God. It’s safe to say that Jefferson didn’t figure on the nation being co-opted by petrochemicals and the captains of industry. In fact, he didn’t seem to truck the corporatization of the nation at all, as evidenced by this delicious statement: "I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." What a guy!

What’s this got to do with the latest population figures? A lot, actually.

With the possible exception of Aaron Burr, folks in Jefferson’s time didn’t anticipate the fractured, polarized, drug-addled, self-centered culture of today. Not that the Founders were unfamiliar with the natural foibles of humanoids, they just didn’t foresee Americans living in the shadow of the dumb-down Madison Avenue psychobabble we’ve all come to know and love.

Yet, here we are: 300 million of us, spread like toe jam across the fruited plains, playing Cosmic Lotto in the desperate hope that it’ll all work out in some dim tomorrow. We’ve managed to injure almost every ecosystem in the Lower 48, a reminder that we value the myopic view over blunt reality. By our sheer numbers, we’ve fouled the air, waters, and seas. We live in a fantasy of our own creation, unaware that a badass hangover lurks in the long dank hall of our collective subconscious. Our heroes are goofs in football costumes, pulling down millions a year in between Budweiser commercials. Or movie stars who couldn’t recall who wrote the Declaration of Independence if their Oscar depended on it. Or pop singers with overgrown egos and a row of bleached-white picket fence teeth.

We’ve lost something in the process of becoming who we now believe ourselves to be. What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep, as it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Excuse me while I hack Francis Scott Key’s noble elegy for the tattered flag. But what now fitfully blows isn’t the same breeze that inspired the lyrical tribute to Fort McHenry’s stars and stripes. No, we’re caught in a whirlwind of global proportions, and most of us don’t recognize it as the force of change that it is. Buddha’s admonition that "all is flux" notwithstanding, some changes are better than others. Lung cancer, for example, is the kind of change worth avoiding. And the subtle, but immutable, changes taking shape out there in the amber waves of grain are also cause for deep questioning.

A few erudite pundits now link increasing human populations with a concomitant loss of personal liberties. A quick glance at current conditions tends to reinforce that hypothesis: West Africa, where even quasi-potable water is a rare liberty; the new China, where bureaucrats decide what news people have access to, how many children are allowed, or whether one’s farmland is ready for immediate industrialization; or Iran, where a slight to the Prophet can result in the loss of one’s noggin’.

If for no other reason than the preservation of your own headroom, America’s latest population tally should make your liver quiver. That the vast American landscape is morphing into grids of suburbs, exurbs, golf courses, parking lots, shopping strips, car washes, airports, and other assorted rubble, is evidence that the captain of the ship jumped overboard a long time ago.

Even the airwaves no longer serve plausible ear candy, thanks to a handful of jive-ass corporate radio conglomerates who think music means markets, and news means murders, rapes, and car crashes. This might sound impossible, but there was a time, not long ago, when radio stations were locally owned and served the people. To turn our frequencies over to a mercenary gang of bean counting suits is tantamount to a surrender of yet another personal stake in the evolution of our own lives.

If your goal is to live in a country that appreciates maximum individual freedoms, the only intelligent path is one that leads towards less people, more space. The fewer rats in the box, the more crumbs per rat. Apply that axiom to rain forests, oceans, watersheds, deserts, jungles, even urban neighborhoods, and you end up with an increase in sanity, a decrease in bullshit. It’s the old carrying capacity routine warmed over and served up with a splash of apple pie and common sense.

Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land, praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserv'd us a nation! Look at it like this: preserving the nation is far more complex than the defense of our shores from oppressive absentee landlords. It involves living within our means, both as individuals and as a people. And that requires living in harmony with the land as well as with our own natures. The folks that called America home in 1491 understood this all too well. From there, things went euphemistically south.

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave! The guy that wrote such poetic mush lived during a time when it was still possible to see 60 million bison grazing across endless vistas of wilderness. The West was occupied by highly sophisticated "native" peoples who knew more about sustainability than Al Gore’s wildest inconvenient truths. That a hokey concept like Manifest Destiny was used to bulldoze such a rich and fantastic land/people into what we call progress is a testament to the twisted ramifications of de-evolution.

Let’s leave it at this: the homogenization of American culture, coupled with 300 million primates in petro-chemical high gear, is a prescription for what we already see happening on the Nightly News – meltdown. And it’s not just global warming that’s at stake, but the kind of freedom most of us only know about from those who experienced it first hand.